Daguerreotype, 1825
David Douglas, the Scottish botanist eponymized in the Douglas fir, classified plants for the Hudson’s Bay Company and the London Horticultural Society. He collected flowers and trees, sometimes whole populations (entire generations of saprophytic pinedrops), had a habit of naming forbs after friends and mentors (when not after himself), portaged up the Columbia River, Chinook guides canoeing him (sometimes day and night), for new specimens, the next new crop of names. Why didn’t he turn to his porters and simply ask what each plant was called? Instead, he wrote, he was the first one to describe them, each one became a first described for science. Instead, he named them after men like William Hooker, who’d never seen them, did not use them, did not understand them. More nomenclature, more jargon, is not knowledge, won’t help you feel the wind from the glacier shaking the river’s mouth – a field of palatial lilies, yellow drops of sun, under a splendid cap of clouds: white cone of the mountain.
Hannah Rodabaugh is the author of Lost Cathedral (Cornerstone Press) and four chapbooks of poetry. Read more.